Havah (7 page)

Having done, we lay in the shade of that tree, beneath the climbing sun, and slept the sleep of the dead.

7

So quiet.

I awoke thinking something lay over my ears. We were alone, the adam and I, upon the grass of the island. How queer the air had gotten here, so that sound came as though through water as I had heard it just that morning while floating down the river.

Too quiet.

The water—did it run? It did, but the sound of it was dull. Even the air through the grass seemed feeble, murmuring like an old man talking to himself.

I sat up. The adam, already awake, had a strange look on his face. For the first time since my creation, I could not discern his thoughts.

We had devoured each other. I had had him as I had eaten the fruit after the first bite: greedily, as though I would consume him, my body one great maw, knowing nothing but appetite.

He had used me the same.

It had never been that way with us before.

Too quiet.

Suddenly I realized: the symphony—that blended chorus of all living things that had been with me since the day of my creation—was gone, replaced by a dull drone.

It came then like a squall in a white-hot flush of silent fear and dread: We had done the thing we were not to do. And as though in proof, we had done a thing we had done many times before, in a way it was never meant to be.

The divine mark of God,
the serpent had called the act of creation. But there was nothing of the One in the thing we had brought to existence.

Fruit pits and skins were strewn everywhere around us like bodies gored and flung away by the great horns of a beast. They were crawling with insects. An inordinate number of insects. There, then, was the source of that drone: the carnage of this feast had attracted a multitude of flies. They crept over the remains of the pits and the stems still attached to some of them, over torn skins, and one another. The fruit nearest me swarmed with a host of winged black bodies. I flicked it away in disgust. It rolled a little way and came to a stop, the flies upon it startled into an airborne mob before attacking it again more voraciously than before.

I hid my face against the adam’s shoulder, but he did not clasp me. He was trembling. So violently did he tremble that his head seemed to shake upon his neck, jerking back and forth, the blue eyes—no longer the blue I knew when I lay down—wide.

This was the most frightening thing of all, the sight of him, my lover, my father and teacher, like this.

Oh, God, what have we done?

I am the leaf shuddering on the stem before the storm. I am the mountain that tremors before the quake. I am the leaping fish that lands upon the bank.

I surveyed the valley around us. It seemed both alien and strange, a thing not itself, as the adam was not himself. There were the usual sounds, fainter, as though from a distance—thinner, as though through a sieve. If I strained, could I smell the scent of Ari, the cud of Adah, the faint scat of the vole, and the grapes upon the terrace?

I could not!

I must think. I must find sense—the One was the author of order! But there was no order in the stillness of the air or the fruit teeming with flies.

The adam let out a sound, feral and raw, and fell down upon the ground, covering his head. I wrapped my arms around him, my limbs clumsy and disassociated, and realized I could not distinguish my sounds from his.

Make me the grass, oblivious to all but the dew! Make me the rock that is moved by nothing! If nothing else, let me be the soil, fallow and unconscious, knowing none of what I know.

I cannot bear it.

Where was the serpent? He had weathered this act. Surely he would know what was to be done. But even as I thought it, I knew he had bidden me eat knowing what would happen. I was sick. I had adored him, and he had bid me eat . . .

Eat and die.

The golden scales had housed poison.

The clots of flies massing upon the refuse must have tripled in this short time; the island teamed with swarming hordes, darkly iridescent in the sun. I barely turned away in time to heave out the contents of my stomach. What came out tasted acrid and foul and gave off a bitter stench. The adam recoiled, confusion and then disgust plain upon his face.

“What is that? Why are you doing that?” The adam stared, pointing. Flies came to feed on my vomit.

“I don’t know.” I wiped my mouth then scurried to the river to wash. I rinsed my mouth and then my face . . . and then my thighs, and then, giving up on ablutions in this way, plunged myself into the water. I sank beneath the surface, letting it cover me, meaning for it to wash me clean—even my ears and my eyes—so that when I emerged again the world might be as it was before. But as water filled my ears, it only entombed them in stifling silence.

Beneath the water I saw the carp, staring at me with one round eye. He whirled away in a cloud of mud.

I came up, spewing water, letting it run from my ears. Overhead, birds swarmed beneath a dingy sun. Gone was their crystalline sound, replaced by cries dull and feral and stupid.

I could not wash the dullness from my ears. I could not wash the dimness from my eyes. Perhaps the adam, if I could rouse him from his stupor, would know what was to be done. He had lived longer than I. Surely he would know what to do.

But when I returned to the bank of the island, he had vanished.

I stared at the place where he had been, at the mass of flies where I had vomited in the grass.

“Adam!” I cried against the growing avian storm. The dark bodies of a thousand birds threatened to blot out the sun. I scrambled out of the water, my hair sticking to my back and shoulders and breasts, rivulets running down my spine and dripping from my nose. “Adam!”

But he was gone. I could no better sense the whereabouts of the man than I could hear the padding of Ari’s pride or Yedod’s pack.

A moist thud sounded somewhere beyond me. It came again and then again, like the patter of heavy rainfall—or the bashing of soft skulls. I spun, looking for its source, but I was alone on this patch of earth in the middle of the river. Then I saw, from the corner of my eye, one of the heavy fruits of that tree fall to the ground. And then another—and another—in a faded golden rain. Overhead, one of the ravens plunged from the horde and tore into the fallen flesh. It seemed darker than it had that morning and softer than it should have been. The smell of it, fainter to my nostrils than before, seemed overly sweet—rotten.

The flies had not let up in any small manner and massed upon the newest spoils. I could see now bees and beetles and roaches among them. The birds descended, a squabbling maelstrom. The thud-thudding of falling fruit, like the cudgel of a heart, seemed it would never end. Beside that great tree, the bush with the berries seemed as vibrant as ever, but it might as well have not existed for the rabid beaks and maws and vermin surging toward every fruit falling to the ground.

I plunged into the river and swam for the bank, fighting the current. Had I ever struggled so much in water or on earth? Had my footing ever been unsure before in my life? Yet I slipped on the bank and stumbled several steps as my stomach threatened to empty itself again. Behind me the island was in riot; birds mobbed the ground, plunging from a swarm that nearly darkened the sky.

Something thumped to the ground before me: a piece of fruit dropped by an avian thief. It was positively rotting, and a beetle was bedded within the pulp like a tick. I shrunk back just as a fox—Chalil, the flute lover!—darted out from a nearby shrub and began, with no heed for the beetle or the carious flesh, to eat it. The adam and I used to laugh at antics such as these. But even as I took a mote of comfort in the sight of him, a shadow streaked across the ground, talons extended. Chalil went down in a flash of feathers, twisting and snapping. Crimson splashed his fur, and the eagle came away with the fruit—and Chalil’s eye.

I screamed and screamed.

I don’t know how long I stood there, paralyzed with screaming long after the fox and eagle had gone, before the adam finally appeared and forcefully pulled me away.

We ran along the river beyond the cloud of frenzied birds and fell down beneath a fig tree.

“Where were you?” I shouted at him.

His eyes were dull. “I went to find the serpent.”

My heart sparked, but the adam’s mouth, so plush, so beloved, was a grim line. “He’s gone.”

I did not know what to say. There was no word for fear. No word for regret.

I HAD AN IDEA that eating one of the figs might settle my rebelling stomach. But at the sight of my hand reaching to pluck it in the same way it had for
that
fruit, I quailed and hid my face within one of the great leaves.

There was no ease. Grief was a river without outlet to the sea.

Was this what it was, then, to die the death? Surely I knew evil now.

The adam’s hands closed around my shoulders. Where before they had brought me comfort, now I felt worse—guilty and most culpable. “I have done this,” I cried, not lifting my face. “I have done this to both of us. Were it not for me, you would not have eaten.”

I wanted him to say that he could have stopped me had he wished. That he might have refused. That we were Ish and Isha, one flesh. He said none of these things.

“We will find the way,” he said, sounding not at all resolved. “We must seek the One that Is.”

My stomach lurched. I had willed thoughts of the One aside the moment I lifted that fruit from the tree. Even upon waking with dulled senses, I had thought to resolve that mystery before facing the One again. But the adam was right. We could not put right all that had gone awry without him.

I let go the leaf. When I dropped my hands, one of them brushed against the adam’s thigh where he stood behind me. I flinched away, thinking again of what we had done. When he caught my hand and brought it back to him, I pulled away. We had used each other cheaply. I felt a hot wash of shame even as I felt an absurd flicker of desire.

This, too, the One would know and would gaze upon us in our guilt.

I felt laid bare, a fruit split open to reveal only moldering inside. I turned away from the adam, unable to look at him. I had cleansed myself to no avail; I felt myself a thing ruined. I snatched back the bough, tore free the leaf . . . and then another—and another and another. I tore at the tree until I held a clutch of leaves within my sweating palm.

“Take me to our bower,” I said.

The peace I had felt beneath the willow arches of our bower—where was it now? Only familiarity remained. I found my basket, cord, and tools and began to twine the fig leaves together in the way the adam had once used to make for me garlands and crowns. But if this were a crown, it was the most shameful sort. When I was finished, I held it over my head. There, in the privacy of this bonnet, my face crumpled and hot tears streaked my swollen cheeks.

The adam tried to hold me, but I pushed him away. He pulled me gently back—now I could feel the tremor in his hands—and lifted the leaves from my face. Perhaps with a vestige of that understanding that needed no words, he lowered it to my waist and tied it there, so that the leaves hung over those parts stained by our use of each other.

I wept to see our industry, so joyously applied in gifts and tokens, in experiments and invention, given to such purpose. When the adam had made a similar covering for himself, he pulled me to him, hard against his chest. He did it, I knew, not to comfort me but himself as he lowered his head to my breast.

I held him in silence. We did not know the language for sorrow or apology. We had no words for forgiveness, for it had never been needed.

8

Midday was filled with the cacophony of birds—birds of all kinds, predator and sparrow alike—churning in the sky. The lion, the wolf, the braying onager were silent, gone. I had seen none of the pride, the pack, or the herd. In fact, I had laid eyes on no animals at all except for Chalil, now gone. There was only the endless sea of birds.

By late afternoon they began to recede. I wondered, had they stripped the tree bare? I shuddered to think of that tree, that island now. How many times in the last hour had I wished to undo all that we had done, to take back that thing we had brought forth—to unknow the thing we now knew?

After a time the horde was gone. There came only the intermittent call of the griffon. The hawk. Then silence.

Finally, in the late hour before twilight, a breeze rushed up from the valley floor. It rose as a sweeping wind over the foothills. Now here came the chorus of animals—not as many as there should have been—excited in its wake, raising raucous choir to heaven. The sky clouded over so that the green of the valley appeared more rich in the strange shade, both more vibrant and darkly alive at once.

The feral address came in waves, dying down and rising again, like wind in a storm, whipping to a frenzy and falling back again.

The adam grabbed my hand. We did not have words for “safe” or “unsafe” then. But I, too, had noted the strangeness of the air and the capriciousness of it, the way the winds seemed to rise upward to buffet the mountaintops before gushing down upon the valley. Clasping his hand, I ran with him down the narrow trail of our hillside bower to the valley. On the far hill a lone goat stood, coat blowing in the wind.

My limbs, once so agile, felt leaden, alien, wooden. We veered toward the orchard, but then the adam pointed toward a grove of willow trees along the river. There they bowed over, branch tips disappeared into the earth where we had tucked them beneath the soil and brought them up again so that they formed a kind of cavern where we had lain on the hottest days.

Inside, the willow cavern was damp. We held to each other, fingers clawlike, as wind buffeted the valley, tossing leaves and other refuse into the air.